Upholstery Time

It's been a little over a year since I last posted to this blog. We drove it around with ugly upholstery that whole time. It was just fun to drive and we didn't care all that much that the interior was so unfinished. Because I never secured the driver's seat cushion down, springs started poking through and I had to be very careful getting in and out of the car to avoid being stabbed. It was time to take the car to the next level.

Last month I ordered a carpet kit and new, leather, seat covers. I also managed to procure, from a local auto upholstery guy, the best contact cement for gluing things down. I don't even know what brand it is, maybe Keystone? It doesn't seem to be available retail. Anyway, I had heard that it was really important to get the right glue. Many of the products you can buy at a hardware store just do not hold up. They may look good when the weather is nice and cool, but heat causes the glue to soften and things fall apart. I didn't want that to happen so I went with the good stuff. I wish I could tell you where to buy it.

The first thing I worked on was installing the carpet kit. Several of the pieces need to be glued on and it takes a lot of glue to do this. Each piece of carpet had to have at least three coats of cement and at least two coats on the metal that the carpet is to attach to. Although I had been told, I was still surprised that the carpet used up most of the gallon of cement I bought. Just putting the carpet in totally changed the look of the car's interior.

There is a piece of aluminum that separated the cabin from the spot that the convertible top rests in when the top is down. This needed to be covered with fabric. I already had a roll of the vinyl that my dad was going to do the car in so I used that instead of buying leather. This was another glue job. I got it done with only a couple of spots where I cut the vinyl a little bit too short. Oh, well, this was my first time doing anything like this so I am not surprised I messed up. It still looks pretty good, in spite of my inexperience. Next - the seats.

Taking the covers off the driver's seat was easy, they were just sort of draped over the seat frames. Both the seat back and the seat frames were broken. Luckily I am a metal worker so I was able to fix them. The metal band that the tops of the springs attach to was broken (rusted out) for several inches. I made a new one out of brass, which is what I happened to have lying around. It is supposed to be made of spring steel. Once that was in, I could reattach the springs so they won't poke through the fabric.

The springs on one side of the seat were rusty and probably weak. Instead of replacing them I shored them up by stuffing bits of foam rubber between the coils. The next layer is coconut fiber mat and on top of that is a felt-like padding. The felt was damaged so I had to beef it up in spots so it was back in shape. The seat back was much better. The frame only needed two welds to be good. It also did not need as much rebuilding of the padding.

Next, the passenger seat. First step, take off the old seat cover. Simple right? On this seat, there was another seat cover, a white one, under the top black one. I took that off and there was yet another black seat cover underneath that one! And the bottom one wasn't the original set, either. This car has had at least three sets of seat covers put on it and all of that was before my dad bought the car in 1975.

The original seat covers are designed to be installed without using nails, there are stiff cards that hook into slots in the seat frame. All of the seat covers on the passenger seat were nailed on. Since whoever did it didn't bother to remove the old seat covers, just nail on another one, there were dozens of nails to pull. These nails don't go into wood, either, they are spiral shank nails into sheet metal. Not easy to get out. Probably 90 percent of the time spent re-doing this seat was in taking it apart.

The passenger seat frames and padding were in really good shape so I didn't have to do any repairs, just go straight to installing the new covers. I was told that doing seat covers was strenuous and that is correct. At times I was kneeling on top of the upside down seat trying to compress the springs so I could pull the leather far enough to get the edge into the slots in the frame.

When the early 190SLs were being made, all of the body parts had the last four digits of the body number drawn on them in chalk or grease pencil. The seats were no different. You can see the number, 2520, on the bottom of the seat frames and even on the fiber "cards" that the seat back leather attaches to. That's the body number of our car.

Putting on new convertible top fabric is the next project. After that I need to re-do the dash pad which was done wrong. That is supposed to be quite difficult so I am saving it to last.

Now the seats are in and the car is really shaping up. I took it for a short test drive and it is quieter inside, too, as well as looking a lot better than the last time I drove it.